It’s a suitable bookend for a career: On June 8, 2021, Guy St.Martin officially exited the rental industry 53 years to the day he started on a full-time basis.
“Now we are learning how to retire,” Guy says of himself and his wife, Terry. Together, the St.Martins were the sole proprietors of Brooklyn Park, Minn.-based Broadway Rental Equipment Co. and Broadway Party and Tent Rental until 2021, when they sold the companies to longtime family friend Chad Wagner, president, A1 Rent It, Wayzata, Minn.
Today, the couple are embarking on their retirement journey with no firm game plan other than reminding themselves — constantly, as it turns out — that they are no longer in rental.
“After selling the store, Guy would stop in periodically, then come home and mention what was going on there. Then we would start talking about the business’s budget, and then we would say, ‘Wait a minute, we don't own it anymore,’” Terry says. “Then, recently, we were driving down the road and saw a logo on a truck for a crane rental company we weren’t familiar with. I felt the need to research them online, but then we said, ‘Wait a minute, we don't own the business anymore.’ We are retraining ourselves.”
Broadway Equipment Rental Co. was opened in 1956 by Guy’s father. Guy started working in the business weekends and holidays in 1962, at age 12, before coming on board full time in 1968 alongside his father and brother. The company specialized exclusively in equipment rentals until the early 1980s, when it branched out to event rentals.
The company’s entry into the event rental market was suggested by Terry, who joined the company in 1980 and soon would become far more than just the part-time help.
“My brothers were working at Broadway. They said they needed help there, so I applied and worked there for the summer. I really enjoyed the position because I was the only woman that worked the sales side. At that time, I was confident only of what a hammer was, and that was literally it. But I loved the challenge of learning new stuff. Then a recession came, and we started getting calls for party equipment. So I suggested that we start doing that — we added party equipment in 1981,” Terry says.
Terry remained with the company, using her clerical skills to help Broadway become a pioneer in the computerization of a rental business.
“Going from manual records to computerization was the biggest change for us during our career,” Terry says. “I found some of our old, historical records from when we started our party division on how you would manually keep track of party equipment — purchases, reservations, etc. Nobody can comprehend that now.”
“We were the first rental store in Minnesota to computerize in 1980,” Guy adds. “After tracking equipment on a three-by-five card, we bought our first software from a company in California, but it didn't have any party software. So we found a fellow who had a program that could incorporate party and equipment and hired him to write software. He developed that and took it nationally, but it started at our store.”
Guy and Terry were married in 1985, and as their company continued to grow, they became heavily involved in their local and national rental associations. It was a move that paid big dividends for them, both personally and professionally.
“We would host a lot of the MRA [Minnesota Rental Association/ARA of Minnesota] meetings at our store,” Guy says. “Because it was larger, people wanted to see it. That was a good promoter for us, because
other rental stores began referring all kinds of people to us. It helped us have a good relationship with the other rental companies.”
Terry’s experience with the MRA led to her becoming an early standard bearer for the concept of Women in Rental, an initiative that would later become a focus of the American Rental Association (ARA).
“I became the secretary for MRA. Then, because of my involvement there, I was invited to be part of ARA's Party Council [predecessor to ARA’s Event Rental Shared Interest Group]. Dorothy Hejny, who was the first female member of the ARA board of directors, was a friend of ours. She really encouraged me to get involved and inspired me to say, ‘I can do this.’ It was kind of a big deal to be on the Party Council because I was the first nonowner to be on an ARA board,” Terry says.
Terry also served on the ARA Board of Directors in the role of Region Six director from 2018-2021.
Volunteerism meant so much to the St.Martins in their career that it tops the list of advice that both offer to those who are new to the industry.
“Get involved with ARA. It is a tremendous resource to help people learn how to operate a good business,” Guy says.
“It sounds cliché, but I would say just get involved as early as you can in the local and national associations,” Terry adds. “To work together with other rental stores really was a highlight for us because we learned so much. We were competitors, but we were friends. The freedom to just share struggles and discuss things because nobody else understands rental — it had an influence and made a difference in our business. That was a real reward.”
As they step away from the industry they served for decades, Guy and Terry say it was their presence as a reliable resource for their customers that they will miss the most.
“We’ll miss our customers. We became a resource to customers who would continually come back to us and say, ‘Hey, I've got this project,’ and knew we could help,” Guy says.
“People would call us first because we would have the answers,” Terry says. “Our slogan was, ‘Name it — we rent it,’ so we wanted to be a resource where we either had the right equipment or at least know where we could refer people so we could live up to that slogan.”
Terry sums up her and Guy’s feelings toward the industry by expressing thanks to the friends and colleagues who were the backbone of a supportive community.
“Thank you to ARA and all of its members for helping us succeed. We could not be bigger advocates of the local rental associations — in our case, the MRA — and the ARA,” she says.